Thursday, January 07, 2016

Synchronicity Can Teach Us Hard Lessons


As I wrote in the previous post, 2015 had some hard lessons for me. But sometimes those are the lessons we need. One thing you will notice is that the more you tune in to what is happening beneath the surface of consensus reality, the more pronounced your experiences become, whether good, bad or in-between. 

 And 2015 taught me that there were some attachments I needed to disattach myself from in order to focus on the real work that needs to be done.

I had a very long talk with our Gordon last night, much of which will hopefully make it to his podcast. We talked quite a bit about Synchronicity and Synchromysticism†, in part because I've been going back to basics and doing the kind of personal Synchromystic work (for lack of a better term) I did for a long time before I started blogging. It's been an interesting experience in that whatever is driving this phenomena often notices you and will begin to engage you in conversation. Synchromystics refer to this as the "Sync Wink."

But we both agreed that Synchronicity was a useful term to encompass certain kinds of phenomena but doesn't really offer much tangible guidance as to the origin of that phenomena or recommend what you can actually do with it.  

It's here that we find ourselves on shakier footing, dealing with the realities of psi and magic. 

I bring this up because while doing the work I noticed an interesting synchronization that said a lot about my recent experience. I had big plans for last year, but 2015 thought otherwise. I didn't just have plans, I did a tremendous amount of work on a fiction project that I announced here. 

I planned to complete the first volume of this project during the autumn months but was floored by a bout of chronic fatigue the likes of which I hadn't experienced before, thanks in part to the brutal, unrelenting pollen season.

It was only while mulling over the events of the past year that I realized the wisdom behind this hard discipline, since I hadn't paid attention to the first warning sign that my 2015 plans were not very good plans.

I was flat on my back. It was almost as if something was trying to tell me something, a message I ignored back in March. 

WHAT IT ALL BOILS DOWN TO

 Gordon and I agreed that Synchronicity and all this other stuff we talk about it is only worth your time if you actually use it for something. Synchronicity, or whatever you want to call it, can act like signs on a highway if you learn its language. I've lost count of the decisions I've made because of a "sync" or a symbol or a sign, decisions that altered the course of my life in powerful and wonderful ways.

Gordon sees it all in the context of magic and I can't argue with that. My only caveat is that magic should always be a means to an end, not an end to itself. 

You see, Synchronicity was popularized by Jung, who seemed to be Aleister Crowley's Janus Twin, the light to his shadow. It's remarkable how alike the two men were, how similar their obsessions were. But Jung seemed to take a turn in which Crowley could not, and lived a life Crowley could have had but denied himself. 

I recently read Francis King's magical biography of Crowley and saw it as a classic tragedy, a brilliant man undone by hubris.*I believe that learning to read Synchronicity- or psi or magical signs, whatever you prefer- properly requires you to let go of that kind of ego, to throw yourself into its currents.

 I can't help but wonder what would have become of Crowley if he let go of this illusion that we can impose our will on forces we still can't even properly identify, never mind control. I think the beginning of wisdom- and magic, even-  is acknowledging how powerless we are in the face of them, just as much as we are in the face of the tides, the winds and the movements of the plates of the earth.

A surfer doesn't impose his will on a wave, he learns how to read waves and how to then let them take him where he wants to go. It takes a lot of skill and practice but also a kind of sixth sense as well. I think that's still a powerful metaphor for dealing with these more ineffable currents.